Viral experiment (5)

Posted on by geertd

I don’t get it. Everybody is talking about transparency when it comes to blogging. We, as an advertising agency, try to do so but get punished for it. In this experiment we tried to post the video to Revver but they didn’t allow the video. This was there reaction:

“an admin has changed the status of your story for the following reason: We don\’t allow self links – so we\’re opting out of your viral experiment.- k? thanks.
The story is: http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=2427″

What I don’t get is that you have to prove on the one hand side that you own the copyright but on the other they accuse you of self linking??? Next time, I’ll ask my little nephew to do the posting for me without any comments.

Viral experiment (3)

Posted on by geertd

Interesting, Dag wrote the following comment on our little experiment on Videosift:

Dag’s first comment
Lame, this is a self-link viral experiment by a marketing company:
http://brandopia.blogspot.com/2006/05/viral-experiment-2.html

My reaction
HI Dag,
why is this lame? We made a nice little video for one of our clients and are posting it on video sharing websites. We are not paying anybody to blog about it, neither are we rating (or clicking like maniacs on the video) the video ourselves. We bring 30 seconds of entertainment (if you don’t like the video that’s something else) to anybody who wants it. We are not interrupting anybody, such as is the case with tv ads or pop-ups. Always happy to discuss this further with you. How is this different from you posting the Apple vs MS ads on this site, except that you don’t work for either of them? The difference on our side is that our client doesn’t have the budget to pay huge amounts of money to run it on tv or advertise it through banners. We had a small budget, made the video and wanted to share with the rest… in the hope that people will like it and (of course) think of TGV or visit tgv.com. We’re really trying to be honest and transparent here (which is also the reason for my posting on my blog).

We’ll see what happens next?

Viral experiment (2)

Posted on by geertd

Ok, postings have begun and the number of view on the videos are rising (slowly but surely), already some people are rating the video and it looks good. At the moment we have posted it on the following sites:Youtube, Putfile, Veoh, Vsocial, Ifilm, Zippyvideos, Flurl, Vimeo, Grouper, Stupidvideos and Videosift. On Videosift we also had the first person who voted for the clip, thanks a lot Krupo! Strange thing however at Revver , while trying to upload the video they replied to us to say that there were copyright issues. Incredible! We acquired all the rights for difusion of this video online on a global scale… so, I don’t see the problem. To be continued…

Viral experiment

Posted on by geertd

For one of our clients, TGV , we are trying a little viral experiment. We have made a nice video (underneath) that we have put on their website, which we believe to have some viral potential. Now we started to post this video on all possible video sharing websites such as Youtube (we have already posted it on +/- 30 of them). The next step in the process is trying to get in contact with influential bloggers in the different target countries to have a look at the video and if they like it to blog about it.

Why did we propose this idea?

We had a very small budget and the client wanted to do a classic banner campaign since their objective was to create brand awareness for their site. With the limited budget we knew we would only be able to buy limited space and with ever-decreasing click-trough rates we didn’t expect a lot of return for their money. That’s why we are trying this. We split the budget in 3: shooting the video, building the webpages and having one of our webmasters ready to get in contact with bloggers during the following 20 days. We are convinced that we will have more view, downloads and visits to their site than if we would have done a simple banner campaign. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this campaign. Of course all remarks are welcome.